The breathe team visits a hospital in South Africa
Leonie and Thomas from the breathe team visited a rural hospital in the Mpumalanga province in South Africa to learn more about the context in which the breathe ventilator could be used and to collect feedback on our latest prototype from local doctors and nurses.
South Africa’s Gini-index is the highest in the world, that means the differences between rich and poor are bigger than anywhere else in the world. This makes it a unique setting: while some people are extremely wealthy and live up to high-income standards, a large part of the population is extremely poor. This also holds for the health care system. Even though advanced health care centers exist, most of the population does not have access to it. People walk hours to the next rural hospital, just to wait there the whole day and to be sent back in the evening. This is especially true for critical care in low-resource settings. Critical care capacities are mostly concentrated to urban settings in South Africa, and as such are often not reachable for the patients in rural areas. Even though transport via an ambulance or on rare occasions even via helicopter is generally possible, the availability of expertise, technology, and infrastructure to prepare critical patients for long transports of several hours on bumpy roads is not guaranteed.
The ventilator is carried through the hospital.
To better understand how devices such as the breathe ventilator can be beneficial in emergency and transport situations in low-resource settings, Leonie and Thomas organized a training course for local doctors and nurses on airway management, oxygenation, and ventilation, conducted by a South African training organization. “Seeing how emergency care in a low-resource hospital works from the inside really helped us to understand the challenges that exist there. Like this, we can further improve the design of our ventilator in the future and better adapt it to the specific needs of the doctors and nurses on the ground”, says Leonie.
The short video below shows the challenges that the doctors face from their perspective and how a ventilator such as breathe could help in low-resource settings.
We show the latest prototype of the breathe ventilator to a local doctor from South Africa